There have been many many remote procedure call/distributed communication protocols. Many have been very deeply specified with thousands of pages of specifications, but in the end the industry moved away from these protocols to a much looser concept. So loose it cannot even deemed a protocol, rather REST is referred to as an architectural style.

REST won not by being the most advanced, or the most capable, or the most efficient, but by being the easiest to get to grips with. Which is both a blessing and a curse. The world is full of less than optimal REST APIs. Because REST is so approachable folks quickly move to building and shipping APIs without considering some of the more thorny issues that every distributed application has to deal with How to manage concurrency, how to deal with lost updates, co-ordinate transactions How to deal with unavailability How to deal with massive scale Oracle REST Data Services is designed to deal with many of these issues, we’ve done the hard thinking and chosen approaches to deal with these issues so developers using ORDS don’t need to worry about them so much. I want to draw a comparison between REST and another foundational technology, UNIX. When I think of UNIX I picture big air conditioned rooms in data centres full of big iron servers. But that’s not the reality of UNIX today. It’s not just data centres and backend servers. The reality is UNIX is all around you, you wear it on your wrist, you carry it in your pocket, it powers the movies you watch when sat on an aeroplane, it controls the car you drive, it is literally everywhere. It is part of the fabric of our reality, but it’s not something out there in front of you. It’s a building block, something atop which much of the rest of the technology in our lives is built upon. I’m sure everyone in this room knows how to get around in UNIX, I’m sure that wasn’t always the case, there was a time when all I knew was MS-DOS and Windows. UNIX was a foreign land, and even seemed like something that was fading away under the march of Windows, but that time was so long ago and now I can’t picture a future where knowing and being comfortable using UNIX won’t be a valuable skill for at least another decade or two. I feel REST is following a similar trajectory. It is almost as old as the HTTP protocol itself, and it’s popularity and ubiquity has taken a considerable amount of time to build, but now that it’s value has been recognised, I don’t see it’s utility being displaced until the next paradigm shift in computing technology occurs. It has become one of the building blocks we take for granted. And thus everyone needs to know and understand REST and more importantly every piece of technology involved in distributed computing needs to be a good and competent REST citizen.

New with REST Data services 3.0 it does not require APEX to define your REST Data services. Oracle currently distributes “Oracle APEX Listener”, which will be renamed to Oracle REST Data Services.

Delivered with Database 12.1.0.2 Java Based plugin replacement for Apache mod_plsql Formally known as Oracle APEX listener available on OTN Available today on our Database Cloud Schema Service